At the most recent IndyCar race from Barber Motorsports Park, Graham Rahal had the best result he has had in over two years. He qualified in third, earned a bonus point for leading a lap, and finished Sunday’s race on the podium.
Not only was it Rahal’s best result since 2023, it was also Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s best race finish since Christian Lundgaard earned a third place finish in early 2024.
From that single viewpoint, one might think that RLL had a compelling weekend and could potentially use the podium finish as a starting point to build momentum. But instead, the successes of last weekend were offset by more troubling signs.
The most obvious indicator was the results of the team’s other two drivers. Mick Schumacher started in the 20th position and finished one lap down in 24th. And Louis Foster, a sophomore driver who won the IndyNXT championship in 2024, finished even lower in the 25th and final position.
These finishing positions right at the back of the field were not due to a wreck or other unexpected incident, but instead on account of an outright lack of pace. Disparity within a team’s driver line-up is not unusual, but the gap between RLL’s three drivers on this day was rather large.
All three cars were also seemingly using the same setup. After large differences in performance earlier in the weekend, the team identified that Rahal’s setup was working much better and made changes so that all three cars would be more or less on equal footing on Sunday.
Granted, both of the younger drivers on the team have vastly less IndyCar experience than Rahal does, but Foster and Schumacher are both sharp behind the wheel.
And one would expect that they would be able to at least come close to matching any pace Rahal was able to accomplish. But that was clearly not the case.
Disparity on track
So what went wrong? Was the setup copied incorrectly from one car to another? Did the driving style of the team’s two younger drivers not mesh well with Rahal’s setup? Answers to these questions are ones that only the team would know.
Rahal, who is typically quite candid about his and his team’s performance, talked about how there was a lot of work to do for the team to understand why there was so much difference in pace.
“They copied my setup today,” said Rahal after the race, referencing his team-mate’s lack of pace. “The last two days they were slightly different. Mick and I are always about the same, which is why we were both good at Phoenix. We both have been very consistently like that. Louis tends to go off down a little bit of a different tangent.
“Today they started the day in the exact same car. We all got to sit down and try to understand. I think Louis ran a different gear strategy, but that was kind of small. We just got to sit down, as I said a minute ago, analyze.
“I know it sounds simple. You’d all think we should know what we did that worked. It’s not quite that simple. We need to understand what the changes were that the #15 made coming into the weekend that got us off on a good foot, then try to carry that into the others and figure out what variation.
“I’m a much heavier driver than they are. That does move the center of gravity, that moves the weight distribution and stuff. They tried to get quite close. We all need to go back and try to understand where the variances may be, frankly.”
Foster, who has yet to earn a single top 10 result despite being 21 races into his IndyCar career with RLL, was understandably downtrodden about his 24th place result and echoed Rahal’s thoughts. “There is not a lot to say about the race really, it just didn’t go our way. I’m confused about what happened but luckily we have a bit of time off to understand.”
In fairness to Foster and the rest of the team, properly understanding tough days on the track is very much a part of motorsport. Problems need to be understood and worked through back at the shop in order for fixes to be implemented in the future.
But this is not an isolated incident, and the team seemingly has similar confusion about its drivers’ lack of pace multiple times per year.
Tire misjudgement
Where deeper problems show themselves is when there is a public admission that the team did not know the rules. After his podium finish, Rahal told media that he thought each car had to complete two stints on the softer alternate tires during the race.
IndyCar did introduce a rule this year that requires multiple alternate tire sets to be used instead of just one, but that only affected street course rounds and not natural terrain road courses. Which means the amendment was not in force during the Barber weekend. A fact that was missed by RLL.
These are the kinds of details media members remind each other of when they arrive at the track on Thursday, and not details those same media members would expect a team to completely gloss over throughout the weekend.
“I’ll be honest,” admitted Rahal. “I screwed up because I thought the rule… I’ll be honest, like I thought that the rule was that you had to run two alts [alternate tires] today, but that’s only a street course thing. It hit me after, so…
“That was the other thing, is that if I was going to run two primes for sure everyone was. I knew having two new ones was going to be a benefit. We’ll live and we’ll learn. We’ll be all right.”
Again, nobody is saying running a three car team in America’s top open wheel series is easy, and mistakes are certainly part of the game. But there is a lingering trend at RLL that shows the team needs a bit more focus on details in order to properly compete with its competitors.
RLL has fought exactly this perception for years, with every improvement seemingly followed up by a quick regression back to old habits. The team’s most recent race shows there are still habits that need to be broken if they hope to secure more than one or two podiums per season.
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